Alicia Haniford
University of British Columbia
Automata are a fixture of French courtly texts, demonstrating a fascination with machinery that can mimic the human form and surpass human intelligence. Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie describes four metal statues that entertain the occupants of the Alabaster Chamber while also monitoring and correcting their behaviour, ensuring the space remains a haven of technologically enhanced courtliness. While the Roman endows these statues with superhuman knowledge, it positions them as benefitting the court by collaborating with the humans they surveil to achieve aesthetic perfection. The social appeal of these literary objects was not confined to the court, however. Just as modern technologies like preventative policing are marketed as public safety measures, medieval texts imagined how complex technologies could be used to target and expose the presence of socially undesirable bodies—such as the metal head of Tábara described by Alonso Tostado, which could identify any nearby Jew, “even if he was not known by anyone.“ This paper brings together the automata described by Benoît and Tostado to consider an imaginative history of artificial intelligence from the Middle Ages to the present day, linking these imagined material technologies with social technologies of classification and difference that they are used to naturalize.